Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Director: Phillip Noyce

Cast: Harrison Ford, Willem Dafoe, Anne Archer, James Earl Jones

Have I Seen it Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: I’ve sometimes compared a film that doesn’t quite work as well as it should to a casserole dish filled with uncooked ingredients. Everything good is there, but the total is less than the sum of its parts. Clear and Present Danger is something different. It is entertaining enough. It certainly clings to the ethos that permeates throughout the Jack Ryan series of films that eschews Clancy’s later instinct to believe his own press*. Ford has yet to start his prolonged period of of sleepwalking through entire films. It’s all good.

And yet…

Something still doesn’t add up. Ford and Noyce are doing better work in Patriot Games (1992). Greer (Jones)—just about the only constant throughout this series—is dispatched in what feels like the kind of thing meant to propel Ryan (Ford) through the third act of the story. Willem Dafoe is always nice to see, especially in a film released before we really knew what we had with him, but he also feels just a tad miscast*. I even prefer Henry Czerny playing essentially the same role in Mission: Impossible (1996), and again in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023) and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025). Ultimately, the story is more than a little too self-conscious for its own good. I almost wish the film would have hued closer to what I was imagine was in John Milius’ original screenplay. I mean, he was the only who has been able to do anything with Conan, so his bite might just have been the right ingredient for this.

All of it is almost right, and the sum total of the movie is pretty good. As such, it is less of an uncooked casserole, and more of a fully cooked casserole made up of a cacophony of leftovers.

I did not think this review of a Tom Clancy movie would have quite so many uses of the word “casserole.”

*A big reason why the film series has struggled to get its act together after this film, despite two or three attempts.

**If I remember correctly, Clancy would have preferred Tom Selleck in the row, and not to be caught on the record agreeing with late Mr. Clancy, but I can see it.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

Director: E. Elias Merhige

Cast: John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Cary Elwes, Suzy Eddie Izzard

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. It’s hard to think of a movie in this era that was more coming for me directly than this one. It’s a little strange to think that it has taken this long for us to get around to it on Beyond the Cabin in the Woods. That being said, it’s weird to admit that my DVD has quite possibly not seen the light of day since I originally bought it in 2001.

Did I Like It: There’s a lot to like here, but not without some disappointments. Dafoe is swinging for the fences with his performance, and chewing scenes in the best possible way. Of particular delight is the scene where Schreck/Orlock is on his own and manages to take in a rush of a sunrise, and is absolutely transfixed by the mere possibility of film. It reminds me of a scene in Chaplin (1992) where Robert Downey Jr. is similarly transfixed by the celluloid possibilities in front of him, and even that scene had to be propped up by voice over narration. It also reminds me of the sequence in Interview with the Vampire (1994) where Brad Pitt is similarly distracted by the possibilities of going to the movies. Here, all we are given is Dafoe’s face, and the film of the sun. The point is made all the same, and honestly gives the only good argument for vampirism that I’ve yet to hear. Somebody comes around and tells me they have a way for me to see films released even beyond my lifetime, I’m going to need someone to talk me down.

And yet, there’s something so singular about his face that the great makeup job can’t quite erase Dafoe from the character he is playing, like the makeup job in the 1920s did for the real (or is he?) Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922). It’s a minor complaint, given that Dafoe’s face is almost a special effect in its own way. Just try to continue staring at the hypnotic opening titles that tries to make something human out of Dafoe’s face and Art Deco elements. It’s easily the most unnerving sequences of this or any horror movie.

My real reservation about the film is structural, though. Searching for a new cinematographer after their first one is waylaid by the downsides of vampirism, Murnau (Malkovich, playing himself) disappears from the movie for some time. This renders the second more than a little aimless and disorganized, robbing the film of its central tension between Murnau and Schreck when it could use it the most.

Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Jason Patric, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison

Have I Seen It Before: Never. It’s always hung out there as some sort of ominous chore from the summer of 1997*, and I’ve missed it for this long.

Did I Like It: The movie presents a fundamental critical question: Is it the wretched, ill-considered sequel which simultaneously no one requested, and which sent de Bont’s career on a decade-long nosedive just as it was starting to get off the ground? Or is it the underappreciated gem which brazenly sported that peak 90s movie imprimatur: “Two Thumbs Up!” ~ Siskel & Ebert.

There are moments where the film does have the same breathless charm of its predecessor. Divorce it from any other context, and one could be forgiven for thinking it is certainly above average for an action movie of its age. Bullock is at the peak of her charms. Dafoe is giving us just a taste of his movie baddie skills, but it is a pretty good taste. Mark Mancina does the score, and while he is absolutely no Hans Zimmer, Jerry Goldsmith, or (hilarious even to bring him up in the same breath) John Williams, he has a singular 90s movie action charm that people like Harold Faltermeyer brought to the table ten years earlier, and Steve Jablonsky or Ramin Djiwandi did ten years later.

In short, you’re likely to get your money’s worth out of the movie, depending on how much money you spent on the endeavor. So, maybe that doesn’t apply to 20th Century Fox.

And yet…

The movie does lose one pretty quickly in its climax. A bus keeps moving and with some speed, but the cruise ship always seems improbably slow. That feels like something that should have buffed out in a screenplay that wasn’t written as quickly as possible, because the PC they were typing on would explode if it went below a certain amount of pages per hour. Now there’s an idea. It’s also probably a victim of its own time, coming six months before the cruise ship disaster movie to end all cruise ship disaster movies.

But let’s not kid ourselves, the real problem is all over this thing. I mentioned that the script seemed to be rushed. With all that extra time they saved writing as fast as possible, you would think the production would have been able to do some more serious work on their film when Keanu passed. Instead, Jason Patric plays some guy who is a hot-shot LAPD officer with more bravery than sense… He’s playing Keanu’s character. A control-F and a couple of lines about this being a new guy was all they could manage. It makes the whole film seem like the type of garment you buy on vacation. It never quite fits right when you get it home, and everyone looking at it can kind of tell it was a misguided decision.

So the answer to the big question lands—as most answers to profound questions usually do—somewhere in the middle.

*Is there are more disappointing summer of movies out there. Between The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Batman & Robin (1997), franchises were laid low. Even with Men in Black (1997) things were a bit on the ho-hum, and we didn’t get a really memorable film out of the year until Titanic (1997) and that came out in December.

Poor Things (2023)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Probably won’t share why precisely, but it was a screening with a pretty strange context.

Did I Like It: Context be damned, this is one of the stranger movies in recent memory. And that is mostly (although not entirely) tied just to that weird belch thing Dafoe does a handful of times throughout the movie. What was that all about? Aside from maybe being some kind of symptom of his looming mortality, but even then it feels like a weird flex of CGI for the sake of CGI.

Aside from that, the film is fine, providing a modern (in theme if not setting) riff on not just the Frankenstein myth generally, but Bride of Frankenstein (1935). I’ve been struck by that earlier film in recent years that for all of its predecessor’s concern about the procurement of viable human brains to animate their patchwork corpses, the sequel (which I still love, regardless of what I’m about to say about it) seemed more obsessed with a woman’s heart, and her brain was an afterthought. It’s only after seeing this film that I realize there was (as much as the Hays Code might allow) not just an omission of personhood for both the Bride there and Bella here, but a savage—even from those who might think of themselves and society would view as benign—hostility and need for possession at play here.

That fundamental oddness and the underlying message are ultimately subservient to the film’s central performance. Stone once again proves that she is willing to strip away most of the glamour normally associated with a movie star in order to display as unflinchingly and cogently as possible, far stranger characters than her early career might have shoved her towards.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Chalk it up to another another cinematic blind spot. As a blissful non-Christian I’m neither offended by the film’s creative liberties and abandonment of the gospels, nor am I particularly moved by the subject matter in the first place. From a distance, I feel almost the same way about the film as I would The Passion of the Christ (2004). I really have to be “in the mood” for a picture about a crucifiction, and I rarely—if ever—am. The key difference is that Scorsese on spec is much more apt to get me “in that mood” than Gibson, or even Jeffrey Hunter, for that matter.

Did I Like It: The film is clearly well made. It would be foolish in the extreme to question the bona fides of Scorsese. The beginning and the ending are undeniably fascinating. Depicting the moral grey area of Jesus (Dafoe) is a revelation that might actually invite a viewer to move beyond the ethical vacuum that Christianity can sometimes create in its followers. Faith alone is nearly worthless if you are more than willing to bring your carpentry skills to bear on a full array of crucifixes. The ending, where Jesus is given something resembling a choice in his fate makes his sacrifice have even some kind of meaning, even for this particular non believer.

The middle, however, could be counted among any other depictions of the life of Jesus one might find. The film is almost too devout at the core, that it once again becomes meaningless. It’s ultimate reverence (and, for that matter, Peter Gabriel score weighing everything down in an 80s milieu) for its subject material keeps me further from the subject matter.

Maybe it should have been more irreverent? That might have cut through my cynicism and gotten me on board. The zealots don’t know a good thing when they have it heading straight for them.